State's Gun Law Needs Serious Tweak

EDITORIAL

The General Assembly passed a comprehensive gun safety bill last year in response to the horrific Newtown killings to keep guns out of the wrong hands. One provision of the otherwise laudable legislation may have missed the mark.

The provision in question says that people who voluntarily admit themselves to a psychiatric hospital cannot have a gun permit for six months thereafter, nor can they possess a gun for the six months following their release.

The main problem with this provision is that it doesn't apply to most of the people who are involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals, or those checking in for drug or alcohol abuse. A majority of people who are hospitalized involuntarily are there under what is called a Physician Emergency Certificate, or PEC. To be committed (for up to 15 days) under a PEC, a physician must determine that an individual may be a danger to himself or others, or is gravely disabled by mental illness.

These people are not denied gun permits or guns (unless they are later formally committed to an institution by a probate court, which happens in only a small number of cases). But guns are denied to people who voluntarily commit themselves, even though many go for treatment of such things as eating disorders, anxiety or post-partum depression, which don't easily connect to gun violence.

Many leading psychiatrists believe this plank in the gun law was a major mistake and should be corrected, but they aren't in agreement about how to correct it. Some would just remove it from the law, on the theory that it might inhibit people from seeking help.

Another way would be to focus on a patient's history of violence. Experts such as Dr. Harold Schwartz, chief psychiatrist at The Institute of Living in Hartford, and Dr. Sigurd H. Ackerman, president and medical director of Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, say psychiatrists are not good at predicting who among those patients without a record of violence will go off and commit violent acts such as mass shootings. The best predictor the doctors have of future violence is past violence.

So assess all patients, apply the gun law to those who show a risk of violence, and see that they receive appropriate treatment.

This isn't a perfect solution, but it is better than arbitrarily creating two classes of patients, as the law does now. However accomplished, the law should be changed.